Intel has been making some very... unusual SoCs recently. As I understand it, this one has a 486-like core at 32MHz. Too bad it's not PC-compatible, because something of that size, performance, and power-consumption would make a great retro PC to play with old software and experiment.

It would!

The Curie is a wonderful little SoC. The built in BLE, Gyro and Power management make it perfect for much more than a beefy UNO clone.

After seeing so much press from Lady Gaga to the X Games, I got a few 101s and started deving. Got to the point I wanted to get a few boards made with it. Turns out the only way a private individual can buy a Curie chip is attached to the 101 board.

Perplexed, I asked a representative a few days ago at a trade show why they were so scarce. It appears Intel, or rather the division responsible, isn't making the individual module available for purchase. That is unless, and I quote, "Your name is Oakley or similar".

Which makes me a little sad as their brand messaging calls for a "Makers Movement" but doesn't give us the products they have developed for it.

One thing I find particularly amusing is the 101's step counter tutorial featured on their Maker page[1]. A 7cm x 5cm pedometer with a battery management circuit that isn't mapped out on the board.

Either way, I hope they release this wonderful little package they have developed.

[1] https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Genuino101CurieIMUStepCou...

> After seeing so much press from Lady Gaga to the X Games, I got a few 101s and started deving. Got to the point I wanted to get a few boards made with it. Turns out the only way a private individual can buy a Curie chip is attached to the 101 board.

> Perplexed, I asked a representative a few days ago at a trade show why they were so scarce. It appears Intel, or rather the division responsible, isn't making the individual module available for purchase. That is unless, and I quote, "Your name is Oakley or similar".

This has been my biggest frustration with Intel. They will not sell their solder-on chips to distributors for some reason. I feel like they could make some major inroads into ARM-dominated markets if they made getting their products much easier. After all, how are you supposed to become an "Oakley" if you can;t get off the ground in the first place? Plus, if you get there on ARM chips, what is your motivation to suddenly switch to Intel once you are big enough for them to give a shit about you?

From what I can tell, the whole thing is basically a PR stunt. Intel are less interested in actually displacing ARM than they are in generating lots of publicity about how they're part of that hip new IoT thing. They've funded an entire TV show called America's Greatest Makers to try and associate the Intel Curie with wearables and the maker movement, done a whole bunch of high-profile tie ins with the X Games, Lady Gaga, Arduino, BMW, etc but they've no interest in actually making it available unless it'll give them publicity.

It seems to be impossible to find official power consumption figures for it anywhere either, and the documentation is lacking in general.

The Curie is a nice little SOC and it will be available to purchase. If you read the press release associated to the recent internal reorg at Intel they mention IoT as one of their focus markets.

Intel isn't "Papa's Fabless Semi Company", and they've got better things to be doing with their expensive fabs than running chips through them to sit on shelves for the rest of time, hoping that someone comes along and buys them. I completely understand why Intel's not interested in wasting a ton of money doing a big production run of these chips, and then having to worry about things like the product's lifecycle without a large enough financial incentive to back it.

That isn't to say "they won't sell their solder on chips to distributors," because they absolutely do: Go to Mouser, select Intel, and look - Quarks and Atoms galore, even high end networking chips, all available for purchase.

One of the sad things I've learned first hand about the tech business is that even profitable small products are just not interesting to billion dollar companies. You need large enough revenues to make a splash as well, and these tiny MCUs selling at quantities of 10K here or 20K there just isn't enough to make Intel want to work for it.

Furthermore, if Intel wants to compete with these SoC vendors, they need to start acting like them - the Curie being a good example of that. They built a custom chip to do what their customers asked of them, and now they're selling it directly to those customers. Everything they're doing is fitting the strategy they've laid out.

> One of the sad things I've learned first hand about the tech business is that even profitable small products are just not interesting to billion dollar companies. You need large enough revenues to make a splash as well, and these tiny MCUs selling at quantities of 10K here or 20K there just isn't enough to make Intel want to work for it.

This is one of the core thesis of the Innovator's Dilemma: the multi-billion dollar companies aren't interested in competing to serve your niche application.

AFAIK The part will be sold through the usual distributors for people to be able to make your own boards.. It wouldn't make any sense for Intel to do all this work and not make the processor available for sale.

Why don't you just buy 101's and remove the curie chip from the 101?

Once you've got the chip removed (which is non-trivial) you then have to prepare it to be resoldered, which would require re-balling in the case of a BGA pinout. This is beyond the scope of what a maker/hobbyist could do.

Don't people do that with converted toaster ovens?

Yes. This sort of thing is classic maker, and if you bought the chips from Intel directly you'd still have to integrate them onto a board.

Re-balling is possible for hobbyists, but it's an extra tricky step that you'd need to do. Why bother when you can buy a nice ARM SoC?

I was wondering if you could get one of those old embedded i386 chips and make a minimal single-board retro PC.

It's not released under a free software license. What a shame.

That's a website bug; the software itself is Free Software, but the download site incorrectly wrapped it in a default click-through EULA. Fixed internally, and the change should propagate to the download site soon.

Which license?

It appears to be the "Intel Software License Agreement". As near as I can tell, it's for inspection only?

Website has the wrong license. Source itself all seems to be 3-clause BSD.

This is the original BSD license, modified by removal of the advertising clause. It is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.

This license is sometimes referred to as the 3-clause BSD license.

The modified BSD license is not bad, as lax permissive licenses go, though the Apache 2.0 license is preferable. However, it is risky to recommend use of “the BSD license”, even for special cases such as small programs, because confusion could easily occur and lead to use of the flawed original BSD license. To avoid this risk, you can suggest the X11 license instead. The X11 license and the modified BSD license are more or less equivalent.

However, the Apache 2.0 license is better for substantial programs, since it prevents patent treachery.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

Is there anything that's still closed-source on the board and if so, what?

The micro-controller HDL files.

What about the hardware?

well this is not OpenSource, they just released the code.

Here is a link to the board design files.. everything is open source (apart from the processor itself)

https://www.arduino.cc/en/uploads/Main/Arduino101RefDesign.z...

In the meantime if you want to play with a small solution there are solutions like the Mbientlab MetaWear that give you a nice small package and are approachable as a maker.

https://mbientlab.com/metawear/

I'd rather use eChronos or seL4. They're provable and free software.

Intel call their thing an RTOS; it's bullshit. They lack proof of hard realtime.

RTOS means a bunch of things; hard realtime is a very specific subset of that.

Interested to see that the download contains 3 distinct GCC cross toolchains: x86, ARC, and ARM.

Um, Wow!

Why am I not surprised. I guessed this months ago and told people to stay away from it.

It was a closed-source blob masquerading as open source hardware (under the Arduino name).

Good thing the people at my hackerspace understood what I was saying, and bought none.

It's a bug on the website. The source itself is all 3-clause BSD.

What aren't you surprised with?